Zhang Hongtu’s Art Studio in Woodside, Queens

Like many artists, Zhang Hongtu considers his studio his home away from home. And conveniently, it’s just a few steps from his narrow detached brick house in Woodside, Queens — out the back door and through a small courtyard — to work every day.

“We bought this house because of the studio,” he said of the 1,875-square-foot building that takes up most of the backyard. This is where Mr. Zhang, 72, made many of the 96 works in the first American survey of his career, which opened last month at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and runs through Feb. 28, 2016.

When he first saw the property in 2004, he liked it so much that he told his wife, Miaoling, “We are going to buy this no matter what the price.”

Fortunately, the owner was intent on selling to an artist who would put the studio to good use. “It was as if he was waiting for us,” Mr. Zhang said. “He could have sold it to someone for more, but he didn’t.”

As he steered a visitor through his simply furnished living room and tidy kitchen, toward the back door, Mr. Zhang paused for a moment at a staircase where framed black-and-white photographs showed the life he and his wife had in China, before he immigrated to the United States in 1982. (She followed in 1984 with their son.) The pictures show the Zhangs as smiling students at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in the 1960s, and in front of the Great Wall, where they celebrated their wedding in 1972.

It was his wife, now 70, who was responsible for the landscaping in the courtyard outside their home, Mr. Zhang noted as he led the way to the studio, pointing out a thicket of bamboo that shields the couple from their neighbors, and a pergola draped in wisteria. “We eat all our meals here in the summer,” he said.

Then, opening the pair of eight-foot-tall rustic wooden doors to his studio, Mr. Zhang explained that the previous owner was a carpenter who renovated the space in a traditional Japanese style. Turning on the lights, Mr. Zhang smiled broadly, as if he were the star of an HGTV series and this was the big reveal. “Every morning when I come here it feels fresh,” he said. “I can always make something in this space. It gives me opportunity.”

The front portion of the studio, a cross between a conference room and a dining room, was furnished with a large oak table that his wife designed. “When we have more than six people over, this is where we eat,” Mr. Zhang said. “We celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and Chinese New Year here.”

In the center of the building, a cluttered office and floor-to-ceiling shelves were separated by a large gong made by Tibetan refugees in Nepal. “Hit it hard,” Mr. Zhang instructed. “The sound makes me feel calm and peaceful.”

Among the art books were two cardboard canisters of Quaker Oats: the container you’d see in a supermarket, with the white-haired man in Quaker garb, and a second one painted over with the face of Mao Zedong. “Quaker Oats Mao” is part of Mr. Zhang’s Warhol-inspired “Long Live Chairman Mao” series. An entire gallery at the Queens Museum is devoted to his Pop Art takedowns of the Communist leader.

Over his desk was a print of “Last Banquet,” Mr. Zhang’s sendup of “The Last Supper,” which substitutes 13 Maos for Jesus and his apostles; another print of the work is on view in Queens. The original collage was made for “China: June 4, 1989,” a 1989 exhibit organized by the Asian American Arts Center of New York in response to the student uprising in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Zhang said “Last Banquet” was supposed to be shown as part of a traveling exhibit in 1990 at the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. But at a time when the National Endowment for the Arts was under fire and conservative critics were on the lookout for sacrilegious art, the piece never made it to the walls. Mr. Zhang ascribes its omission to “censorship.”

“I was shocked,” he said. “The censorship made this painting popular, but it was not real censorship like in China, because I was able to show it in other exhibits.”

The raw work space at the back of the studio is where Mr. Zhang paints and builds sculptures like “Ping Pong Mao,” a regulation Ping-Pong table with large cutouts of Mao’s silhouette on either side that make it unusable. That vacant silhouette is a motif that appears frequently in Mr. Zhang’s work: “I grew up with a positive image of Mao,” he said, by way of explanation. “And now my mind holds a negative image of him.”

He has been critiquing Mao’s Cultural Revolution since he first came to New York to study at the Art Students League. But Mao isn’t his only target. An inveterate mischief-maker, Mr. Zhang also likes to tweak traditional Chinese painting. “Remake of Ma Yuan’s Water Album (780 Years Later) R,” a large canvas in the studio, depicts an ancient Chinese landscape blighted by pollution.

“It’s very subtle, but it makes you uncomfortable,” he said.

After many years of living in Manhattan and making art in pre-gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he has found a profound sense of belonging in Woodside.

“I never feel like a foreigner here,” he said. “My neighbor on one side is Italian. On the other side, they’re from Singapore, and the next house over, from South America. On the street, you see a lot of people from Tibet and Bhutan. This is America to me.”

Correction:

An article last Sunday about the artist Zhang Hongtu described incorrectly an artwork on display in a survey of Mr. Zhang’s work at the Queens Museum. It is a print of “Last Banquet,” not the original work.